Christine Griffin may be confined to a wheelchair, but her career has wings and is flying high.

Culminating a career dedicated to disability rights law, Griffin will be sworn in next month as the first female EEOC commissioner with a physical disability.

She will be charged with enforcing federal employment laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act - a law that changed Griffin's career path when it passed in 1990, her first year of law school.

Partially paralyzed after an auto accident in college, Griffin, 50, knows first-hand about navigating the workforce with a disability.

Before law school, she worked as an engineer inspecting medical devices for the FDA and recalls many site visits where her wheelchair did not have access. But her decision to go to law school had nothing to do with disability law.

"I went to law school thinking I would do something FDA-related," Griffin said.

Then something happened that made her rethink her goals.

"The Americans with Disability Act passed during my first year of law school, and I started to learn that this whole body of law existed," she said.

During her third year, she noticed a flyer on a bulletin board advertising a fellowship to "create your own public interest job."

"I thought 'Oh my God, this is a great idea. I can do disability law and work within the context of the ADA,'" said Griffin, who went on to win the competitive Skadden Arps fellowship to do outreach to minorities with disabilities.

"That was what got me started on this path," she said.

Griffin joined the army in her twenties and later graduated from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy which she said taught her "how to take orders." But her rebellious nature has fueled her strong sense of justice.

"I was always a big-mouth. I was always the one saying 'That doesn't seem fair,'" she said.

In law school, she remembers convincing a professor in a clinical program to take a client with cerebral palsy even though he exceeded the income limit and no one besides Griffin could understand him because of a severe speech impediment.

"The professor made me call a bunch of disability lawyers to see if they would take the case. Each one of them said, 'It sounds like you want to take the case,' so I was able to represent him," Griffin recalled.

In addition to negotiating his eviction claim, she even found him an adult literacy class and encouraged the client to learn how to read.

This January, Griffin will fill one of two Democratic seats on the five-member bipartisan EEOC. She has 10 years of experience as executive director of the Disability Law Center in Boston.

In her new position, Griffin hopes to address the unemployment rate among people with disabilities - the highest of any group, at a whopping 65 percent.

"That's huge," Griffin said. "Unemployment affects everything from self-worth to net worth."

Griffin is passionate about educating people with disabilities about their rights.

"Unless you know your rights, no one is going to enforce them," she said. "There's no ADA police out there - there's only you. If you don't know that an employer shouldn't ask you that illegal question, you will never be able to enforce your rights."

Griffin also hopes to influence whether disabled workers are classified as "employees" or "trainees" and the type of protection they receive as a result.

"To be able to have any part nationally in making employment opportunities better for people and in enforcing the laws that create opportunity will be amazing," she said.